Puffbox

Further evidence of the power of search engines – and why you should be concentrating on search engine optimisation any time you build a site, or write an article. Heather at Hitwise reveals that Google now has a 78% market share in UK searching… and that figure is rising, up 9% on last year. (Yahoo, MSN and Ask don’t make it beyond a single digit.)

But even more interesting, she notes that 35-40% of all traffic to sites classified by Hitwise as ‘Travel Agencies, Appliances & Electronics and Insurance’ – all big players when it comes to e-commerce – comes from search engines. And yes, the trend here is upwards too. ‘In the week to 21st October 2006,’ she writes, ‘Travel Agencies received 39% of their upstream visits from search engines, up 7% in the past six months. For such an established category, that is a huge gain.’

In other words – people are becoming ever more reliant on search engines, and more specifically on Google, to get what they want from the internet. If you’re running a website, and you aren’t giving serious thought to your placement on Google, and how you can improve it – consider yourself warned.

A quick check of my blog stats reveals that my comments on yesterday’s first half hour of Al Jazeera English got picked up by Slate, the Guardian and the BBC’s Arabic website. Even my cynical side gets a bit excited at seeing my name under their mastheads, and so completely unexpectedly. Did nobody else think to blog about it? Hi to anyone following those links, by the way. And if you can tell me what the Arabic page says about me, even better. 🙂

I’m really disappointed by AlJazeera’s new English-language website. There are hints that they’re trying to do good things with it… but the actual execution doesn’t really follow through. I have to say, this is in stark contrast to the super-polished nature of the new TV channel.

They offer both Flash and HTML versions of the homepage, for example: but it only covers the ‘top stories’ area, and it doesn’t do much more than offer a ‘hover’ effect, turning the photos from greyscale to colour. If that’s all they wanted to do, I guess they could have done it using javascript and/or CSS. But having made the decision to go with Flash on the homepage, I’d have hoped for something much more ambitious. I have yet to see a news site really pushing Flash to its limits for homepage (or story) presentation. Someone will do it, eventually, and everyone will love it.

The rendering of the stories themselves is a bit clunky, but that’s nothing compared to the appalling code markup under the surface. Sites shouldn’t be using TABLEs these days, for example – and they certainly shouldn’t have inline styling (‘font size=’ inside all paragraph tags? are you using FrontPage or something?). There’s also something pretty horrible going on with CMS buttons appearing in the page code. (Try turning off the CSS on a story page to see the true horror.) As promised, there are RSS feeds per channel (Americas, Africa, Europe, Middle East etc), but they haven’t bothered with autodiscovery tags. It looks like they’re using the unpopular Microsoft Content Management System product, but that’s no excuse.

Jeff Jarvis also notes the curious approach to video streaming: you get 15 minutes of free low-bandwidth video, after which you have to restart the stream. Continuous broadband-quality viewing costs £11.99 a month.

They clearly aren’t taking the web anywhere near as seriously as their TV product… and for an operation effectively starting from scratch this week, that’s unforgivable.

Al Jazeera went live at 12 noon GMT, broadcasting live from Doha, Qatar – and there’s no denying it looks beautiful. It takes the best bits of the Sky News studio set, the best elements of the BBC’s graphics, and adds an extra layer of class on top. You can really see the benefit of the HD signals coming through. Subtle on-screen graphics – with neither ticker nor clock. No advert breaks, and no ‘headlines every five minutes’. A few wobbly camera shots in the first few moments, but nothing unforgivable, certainly not at this stage.

The top story, a little disappointingly, was itself – a revolution in TV news, or something. From there, almost inevitably, we go to the latest deaths in Israel / Palestine… and the channel starts to show its distinguishing features. Lots of live two-way interviews, including correspondents in Gaza, Jerusalem, a Darfur refugee camp, Tehran (a welcome return for Rageh Omaar), and most interesting of all – Harare, Zimbabwe, apparently the first live TV signal from a foreign broadcaster in seven years.

Interesting to watch so far – but it all feels a bit worthy. There weren’t really any obvious ‘news’ lines to a lot of the reports. I’m sure conditions in Sudan are terrible, but nothing has obviously happened today to make them any worse than yesterday. Same goes for Zimbabwe. Maybe this is just the channel making an early mark, but it’s going to have to develop a harder news edge… and I wonder if that’s possible when you take such a consciously global remit.

It’s all happening on Sky Digital channel 514. Look out for an exclusive interview with Tony Blair later in the day (apparently).

There’s a new beta version of the free Skype ‘internet phone calls’ software, but I’m still bitterly disappointed by one glaring omission. Even when you become a paying customer, with an incoming phone number (for normal phones to call) and a voicemail account, there’s no way to get your voicemails emailed to you. Rival product Gizmo Project does this… and it does it free of charge.

I want to use Skype. It’s the cool tool, with at least some degree of name recognition (although I can count on one hand the number of calls I’ve ever received on it). The video chat is really cute. But it eats system resources, and uses the same port used by a webserver, which is a pain when I’m doing any code testing.

Listen, Skype: seriously, you need to sort out a way to email me my voicemails, as an MP3 attachment or something. Otherwise there is simply no compelling reason for me to stay with you, and I will switch to Gizmo. Reluctantly.

Tomorrow’s going to be one of the most interesting media launches for some time, as Al Jazeera’s long-awaited English language service finally begins broadcasting. The TV channel, with a host of familiar faces, will be backed up by a relaunched website which promises ‘RSS feeds, live streams and downloadable clips from the channel, as well as interactive discussions and polling’.

If you’re interested, there’s a promo video available for viewing on YouTube…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIVikteiQj8]

… but it was posted by someone with the ID ‘ForeignPolicyMag’, which suggests it hasn’t been put there ‘officially’.

Can it work? It’s going to be fascinating to see. I’m not sure the general audience is ready for a channel with a foreign-sounding name, let alone a radically different viewpoint… but maybe they aren’t interested in the general audience anyway. It all starts tomorrow lunchtime.

As panic spreads regarding video sharing sites and copyrighted material, it’s a pleasant surprise to see one rights-holder going the entirely opposite direction. If you’re an ice hockey fan like myself, you’re now able to watch classic and current games from every NHL team, streamed by Google Video, or even downloaded to your PSP/iPod.

The NHL really irritated its fans, when it failed to put on a season 2004-05 due to industrial relations problems. They’ve made some smart moves to win the fans back, and I see this move as part of that. I can’t imagine many, apart from the hardcore fans, finding the time to spend two hours plus watching entire games… and you’d be getting enough of their money anyway. Ironically, if you want to watch the (considerably) lower-quality spectacle of the UK’s Elite League, you’ll have to pay £75 a year.

I’ve spent virtually all my career working fulltime in the new media environment. Overall, that’s been brilliant. But one catch is the transient nature of your work. Look through my CV and you’ll see a list of high-profile projects and employers/clients. A quick Google check will find the right web address… but it’s almost certainly not the same website that I built, maybe a decade ago. And web.archive.org will only get you so far.

On reflection, I should probably have kept more screengrabs. But even then, you wouldn’t get a fair picture of ‘how it was back then’. Some of the design was cutting-edge for its time, but just doesn’t stand up by today’s standards.

So it was a real treat to discover that one particular project, from a full nine years ago, remains exactly as I left it. Whilst working for the Foreign Office, I was seconded for a couple of weeks to help the Commonwealth Secretariat as they organised their 1997 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh. I decided to run a ‘daily online newspaper’ for the event, covering the event’s formalities and informalities. There were picture galleries, with (relatively) hi-res imagery for free download; a bit of audio, although if we’d made the MiniDisc player work better, we’d have done more; and a daily global (web-based) press review.

Looking back, I have to say, I’m pretty proud of it. All coded by hand, on a Viglen 486 laptop with a 640×480 colour screen (in the days when that was a big deal), and uploaded manually via FTP and a 14.4 dial-up line. Of course, these days, I’d just chuck it all in WordPress and have done with it. But it’s nice to think I might actually have invented the ‘conference blog’ with this?!

Talk today in the Commons about MPs’ communication to their constituents. The BBC reports: ‘MPs could get an extra £10,000 a year to help them keep in touch with constituents in a planned shake-up of the commons allowances system. Commons leader Jack Straw said a change to the expenses policy was needed as MPs now received 300 letters a week.’

The article goes on to quote Straw: ‘We do have to keep up with the times. There is a demand, not for a report with glossy photographs of a sitting MP but actually describing in some detail what I have been doing.’ Hang on… cheap one-to-many communication? describing your constituency work in detail? Did somebody say ‘blog’?

As I was discussing with a fellow pro the other day… the tools are now available at negligible cost. Give every MP a WordPress-based blog (cost: free), based on the recently released WordPress MU v1.0, on some external hosting space (cost: maybe as little as £150 per year). Get someone who knows what they’re doing to set it up. Lots of RSS and email alerting. And plenty of change from your 10-grand-a-head.

Not sure how much to trust it, given the lengthy disclaimer (‘anecdotal’, ‘proof of concept’, etc)… but it’s good to see Microsoft offering hard numbers on the keywords used in searches. Not quite as great as the equivalent from Yahoo, which gives precise numbers for each keyword – and for each combination using that keyword. Still my favourite data source out there. Still no sign of Google sharing its numbers.

If you do any serious writing for the web, especially in a commercial role, you should be checking these two sites. Use the same words in your headlines and page titles as people use in their searches. This is how to buy your way up the Google rankings.